The Biology of Hyper Intuition
by omgpink
Summary: Describing moment before the Vongola Decimo is shot down by the Millefiore, this is an alternative ending to Amano's series.


**The Biology of Hyper Intuition**  
Prompt: Memories; "He looked back into the past."

* * *

Sawada Tsunayoshi stumbled through the pitch-black hallway of his base, lost in a maze of smoke in a home he thought he knew. He felt the walls with his hands, dried blood powdering his nail beds. Gokudera wasn't getting any lighter. He dragged the bleeding man through the smoke of burning metal and concrete. At the deepest levels of the base, the power generator had exploded into an artificial hell. The flames burned up the shafts, popping the metal supports, and changing the chemistry of the rock into something that crumbled and polluted the air. He held a fancy handkerchief to his mouth so he would not choke on the fuming metal oxides and rock dust.

Nearby, an electric light bulb broke, and he watched the cackling electricity in horror. He was that little boy again, wasn't he? Deep down? He had made a full circle, returning last to that worthless child. That great elephant had shriveled from his heart into something disgusting, meek, and rat-like, deflated of all his flame. What happened to a soldier when his country was dead. Vengeance? Tsuna never had that sense of honor. He could never bring his friends back and for everyone he lost this past year, Tsuna's own will diminished like a candle into its hot pool of wax. That's right, Kyoko bowed to the poison of another man. Yamamoto lost on a suicidal mission. And Hibari was the first shrew smoked from their Namimori burrow. Each of their bodies had disappeared, and Tsuna never saw them die. They were taken from him, ripped from his tight hand, and brought around the corner to be euthanized. Their deaths were hidden from him on purpose, though, it looked like Gokudera might give him the honor if a witness to the last breath could be called such. His first friend's face twisted in painful contortions - these his only words to speak his frustrations. His body didn't have the strength to clutch his gut. He hung on Tsuna's shoulder while he crept through the obscure tunnels of the vast base.

At last, Tsuna's leaned against the wall, exhausted. Gokudera slid off Tsuna's cloak, and the mafia boss wobbled, grabbing his arm and easing him to the ground. Imagine—this was all he had left. Even Reborn's rock beige pacifier was locked in the enemy's safe.

"Gokudera-kun," he said, as if the word might remind his ally to catch himself and stand. Still, his back touched the ground, liquid in this smooth transition. An enormous wine-red stain spread across the front of Gokudera's white shirt, the jacket gone. His face now rested, but Tsuna could not see through the smoke.

"You wanted to destroy the Vongola, didn't you?" Byakuran's smooth voice broke into bits and pieces, issuing from loudspeaker next to a security camera. "It makes sense that their destruction is your inheritance. Rather silly, considering you decided it~" and his voice swayed like a ballroom of dancers, elegant and strong. Byakuran watched through the security camera, and then he was off, headed to the precise coordinates of the base to eat his last pawn as he did the bag of marshmallows. Meanwhile, Tsuna's golden eyes were no longer bright, but faded and rubbed out. They were cast down, watering from the bitterness of the smoke. He did not speak. Byakuran continued, full of words, carrying the mic with him like an enthusiastic reporter.

Suddenly, Tsuna's eye's lifted up. He did not listen to Byakuran, for his own mirror image stood above him, radiating in the flames extinguished from his own soul. He mouthed 'Primo' under his handkerchief.

Smoke vacated the area between them, encasing them in a bubble of cleared atmosphere. Tsuna found it hard to breath, but he could at least remove the handkerchief from his mouth. The surrounding hot, dark air had lost its transparency, the darkest and deepest of blacks. There was no base. There was no security camera. Only him, the flames of his inheritance, and this oily darkness.

"I'm sorry," Tsuna said. "This is all my fault. It shouldn't have happened like this. Gokudera, I need to get him out of here. Please!" His guilt made him rise above the ground, or the floor drop from beneath him. He touched nothing in the room, like Primo. The image of his Vongola ancestor shivered, as if it was born from Tsuna's breathe. He was haloed in a golden oval the shape of a candle's flame, and Tsuna's eyes hurt and his lungs became dry.

In the first split second that Tsuna was shot, the bullet ripped through the jelly gray chunks of brain and severed his optic nerve. He only felt an ache in his head, the brain an organ absent of pain, until the bullet bounced off his inner skull, fragmented, and tore further, deeper, and more cruelly than any dying will practice bullet. His hyper intuition attacked the cold metal like antibodies that could not make sense of the virus. These protective flames built uselessly around Byakuran's indiscernible will, grew into the spiking needles of a supernova in the time it might take fingers to snap.

But for the Vongola Boss, time tumbled in away. As the first two cells of his hippocampus dissolved, he became another person, transformed, a reverse reincarnation. Tsuna no longer Tsuna, but Timoteo experiencing the knife in his gut, the way it twisted, the sharp pain. And as the whisper hissed backwards in his ear, two more cells split apart and Timoteo, before he could realize his existence in the flesh of another man, switched to his mother, Daniela, awakened from the same peaceful state she had slipped away in from her strychnine exhausted body. Her hand would have come to her cheek, and her lungs would have choked, suddenly not filled with fluid and foam, but two more cells were untied, hailing Fabio. Down the line of Kings fell like a line of dominoes.

Primo watched the young man, his gaze full and intent on his eyes. He saw his children pass as Tsuna's eyes changed shape and emotion, each rising from their graves and into a death more unknown. He watched as they passed, invisible to the puppeteer above holding the gun.

"I apologize," Primo said softly. "This is all my fault. It never should have happened like this."

And after Ricardo realized how the meandering taste of brandy had been replaced with ash, Primo snapped, disappeared, gone into an unborn world. Only innocent predecessors marched through Tsuna now, a fearful cowardly race that based many a Vongola personality. They were men and women of the potential of Tsuna, but were never given the encouragement to grow and stretch and speak, never manifesting themselves for the lonely Primo.

More bullets tore through the graveyard of the Vongola, breaking all nerves, severing all ties. Tsuna had no son to take his right. Everything died with him. Where Tsuna's mind went black for centuries, Byakuran's spanned horizontally all dimensions. Now he stood alone, the sole possessor of the wisdom of many lives. All he had left to play was solitaire. He looked down, his eyes happy slits, Tsuna had died many split-seconds ago. What lay before him was an ancient bag of sins. A dissolved ship in a bottle. It died like a suffocated spaceman, without any ground beneath, without any friend to fall upon, levitated under the crescent moon of Byakuran's smile.


End file.
